Benevolent Insects and Garden Friends |
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Ladybugs : What they do for you:
Eat Aphids
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Bumble bees are significant pollinators
What they do for the garden: Mantis religiosa Known singularly as
the Praying Mantis. This friendly insect is the top of the insect food chain. It will eat almost all insects that it happens
to run across
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Birds
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What they do for you:
A good presence of birds in your garden especially in the spring will definitely limit the damage that insects eventually
do. For example, a chickadee can eat 200 to 500 insects a day. A brown thrasher can eat about 600 insects a day. And
a house wren is capable of feeding approximately 500 spiders and caterpillars to its young each and every day. Other beneficial
garden insectivore birds include robins, finches, bluebirds, bobolinks, meadowlarks, doves, field sparrows, purple martins,
swallows, kingbirds, black phoebes, titmice, orioles, and woodpeckers.
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Common Garter Snake
What they do for you: Eat destructive insects in your garden
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What they do for you: Eat annoying and destructive insect larvae before they hatch.
Braconid wasps are small (half an inch or less) wasps that attack corn borers, sawflies and all sorts
of larval pests.
Trichogramma wasps are tiny wasps which prey on the eggs of more than 200 worm type pests, including borers, webworms,
and many types of moth caterpillars. The wasps lay their eggs directly into the pest's eggs, killing the eggs as they hatch.
As soon as the wasps mature, they will fly off in search of new eggs to parasitize. Aphid-eating solitary wasps (Passaloecus
spp.) These tiny (1/4 to 1/2” long) wasps can pack a lot of aphids in their nest, so they may really help with your
aphid problems if you build up a population of them. This can be done by giving them living quarters, usually little round
holes drilled in wood.
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